Sustainability of Social Enterprises: Is Quadruple Bottom Line the Pathway?

The background of this paper lies in the continuous search for sustainability in the emerging social enterprise space. The concept of sustainability reached the public domain through deliberations and policies of international bodies working with the developmental agenda and social justice and implies a movement towards adopting a holistically systemic view for ensuring responsible continuity. The research question that drives this paper is: how does a social enterprise obtain sustainability? The objective of the paper is to dissect the journey of selected social enterprises and their efforts to assess the sustainability agenda, in terms of the triple bottomline (TBL) (Elkington, 1998a) and thereafter to adapt the fourth dimension, governance as the quadruple bottomline (QBL) indicator (Sawaf, 2014). The sustainability pathway for Indian social enterprises has been assessed through primary qualitative interviews. The findings of this study indicate that increasingly social enterprises are moving to follow the QBL sustainability matrix. A steady movement towards more fully integrated systems and processes for organizational sustainability among social enterprises following QBL is observed. The authors humbly posit that this research contributes to literature as one which has analysed the sustainability aspect of social enterprises. The direction to social enterprises that are implied in this paper hint towards granting importance to “governance” so as to avoid continuous dependence on promoters for funding. Learnings gleaned from the experience of successful social enterprises is that a well-rounded pattern of people, planet, profit and governance may lead to a stable future.